Sunflowers are so cheerful. They stand tall, and their bright yellow faces turn to follow the sun across the sky. This time of year they’re a familiar sight in North America, where they grow in gardens and fields and along roadsides. As the seedheads ripen in late summer, birds seek them out and have picnics on them, picking out the nutritious, oil-laden kernels.

The birds are right to value sunflower seeds as snack food—sunflowers carry health benefits that go beyond the smiles they bring to our faces when we see them. Research and nutritional analyses show that sunflower seeds are loaded with protein, they’re an energy food, and they’re a rich source of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals.

These plants also have history on their side. For 3,000 years, many Native American tribes cultivated them as a staple of their diets. The ancient Aztecs worshiped them, traditional herbalists used them medicinally and, today, they’re a major food crop in the United States. Sunflowers are native to this continent, so they can rightly be called an all-American snack.

Seed appeal

The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an annual plant in the daisy family. It has coarse, hairy leaves, and it looks rough as it rapidly grows in early summer. By the end of the season, some varieties can tower 10 to 12 feet high.

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Atop this gawky stalk is the single brilliantly colored ray flower that delivers its precious cargo of seeds. That flower is a lesson in efficient packing, with up to 2,000 zebra-striped seeds crammed tightly together in concentric circles within the flower head. In its form and growth habits, the sunflower offers comedy, drama, and geometry in addition to its other attributes.

It’s simple to grow. If you have the space, try it and you may end up with your own harvest of seeds if you beat the birds to it. See the box on page 63 for growing instructions. If you’re not a gardener, sunflower seeds for eating are sold in every convenience store and grocery, right next to the potato chips and pretzels.

The seed, where the sunflower packs its nutrition, is dried, soaked in saltwater, then roasted. The tiny kernels are chewy, nutty, and mild tasting, delicious by themselves. Some professional athletes can be seen chomping away on handfuls of sunflower seeds, spitting out the hulls as they go. Shelled seeds are easy to toss into ­salads and sandwiches, incorporate into breads and pastries, sprinkle on baked potatoes or hot cereal, and use in a variety of vegetarian dishes. They can be ground in a coffee mill and added to flour for pancakes or pie crusts, to which they lend a distinctive nutty flavor. The seed is also the source of a premium oil, valued by cooks for its light color, mild flavor, relatively low level of saturated fats, and its ability to withstand cooking at high temperatures.

Scatter some seeds

Want to grow your own nutritious sunflower seeds? This time next year, you could be enjoying the sunny beauty of the tall ray flowers in your gardens and looking forward to a harvest of seeds before cold weather sets in. It’s easy. Here’s how.

Sunflowers come in many sizes and colors. The most common variety grown for eating is the Mammoth sunflower, the giant with a stalk that climbs 10 feet into the air and produces a seed head up to 15 inches across. It is commonly available at nurseries that sell seeds and through mail order.

The sunflower is not fussy about its location or soil as long as it’s planted in full sun. Prepare a patch of dirt by weeding and turning over the soil to loosen it. In the spring, plant the seeds, in their shells, and cover them lightly with soil. Keep them watered well until they send up their shoots, then stand back and watch them grow. Thin the plants so that they’re 12 to 18 inches apart. Occasionally, water them (particularly during very hot weather) and feed them lightly with a general all-purpose fertilizer. If they’re planted in an exposed location, particularly if you’re in a windy area, consider bracing the stalks as they grow by putting stakes on either side of a row and stringing a wire or string for them to lean against.

After the sunflower blooms, the head will start to shrivel and turn brown. You want to let the seeds ripen on the stalk, but check them every day to be sure you don’t leave them so long that the seeds start to fall out on their own. You know seeds are ripe when you can easily remove them from the plant. Cut the stalk off, hang it up in an airy place, perhaps the garage, and leave it until the seeds are completely dried.

Modern varieties have been cultivated so that the sunflower heads droop late in the season, which has the advantage of not attracting so many seed-loving birds. One way to avoid damage by birds is to cover the seed head in the final ripening period with mesh, cheesecloth, or nylon. If cold, damp fall weather threatens, harvest your stalk, even if it’s not quite ready, and dry it.

To prepare the dried sunflower seeds to eat, brown 1 cup of seed in the shell in 1/2 teaspoon of cooking oil. Drain off any excess oil, place the seeds in a bowl, sprinkle with salt, and toss.

Why eat them?

For a peek inside that seed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutritional database on edible plants offers a string of numbers that hold the secret of its goodness. Below are some of sunflower seeds’ components and a description of their possible benefits; the nutritional figures are based on the edible portion of 1 cup of seeds in their hulls, or 46 g of kernels—perhaps what the average person would consume, at least on a heavy snacking day.

Vitamin E. Sunflower seeds are a good source of this powerful antioxidant, which is believed to prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease and slow the effects of aging, among other benefits. The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for vitamin E is 8 to 10 mg; 46 g of sunflower seeds delivers 23 mg.

B-Complex Vitamins. Sunflowers offer a good supply of B vitamins, which help metabolize carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Specifically, sunflowers contain B6, folate, and pantothenic acid. Vitamin B6 is vital for the maintenance of almost all body functions and can affect both physical and mental health. The cup of sunflower seeds in their hulls has 0.35 mg of B6, compared to the RDA of 1.6 to 2 mg.

Folate, or folic acid, is involved in the metabolism of protein, the formation of red blood cells, and the transmission of nerve impulses, among other activities, and can affect mood, sleep, appetite, and the immune system. The RDA for folic acid is 180 to 200 mcg, more for pregnant and nursing women; sunflower seeds have 105 mcg.

The body uses pantothenic acid in its metabolism and in the synthesis of hormones and blood. It’s also known as the anti-stress vitamin. The level recommended by the National Research Council is 4 to 7 mg; sunflower seeds have 3 mg.

Minerals. The minerals found in substantial quantities in sunflower seeds include phosphorus, iron, and selenium. Phosphorus is important in maintaining healthy bones and teeth and sustaining energy levels, and is vital to the growth and maintenance of all body tissue. The RDA for phosphorus is 800 mg; you can get 324 mg from that cup of sunflower seeds in their shells.

The body uses iron to make red blood cells, produce energy, maintain the immune system, and other functions. The RDA is 10 mg for adults, half again as much for women of childbearing age; sunflower seeds deliver 3 mg.

The body needs selenium, a trace mineral, to activate an antioxidant enzyme that is credited with a wide variety of effects, including lowering the risk of heart disease and relieving anxiety and depression. The RDA is 55 to 70 mcg; sunflower seeds have 27 mcg.

Amino acids. These are the building blocks that make up the proteins in every cell in the body. Sunflowers are an excellent source of two amino acids in particular, phenylalanine and arginine. In fact, sunflower seeds are one of the best sources of phenylalanine, a chemical that plays a role in the formation of neurotransmitters and is involved in controlling pain. Jim Duke, a longtime medicinal-plant researcher for the USDA and a leading authority on healing herbs, states it de­finitively in his book The Green Pharmacy (Rodale, 1997): “If I were in pain, I’d eat a handful of sunflower seeds . . . and use ground seeds in a poultice on painful areas.”

Finally, sunflower seeds are the richest known source of the vital amino acid arginine, which is helpful in treating angina, high cholesterol, hypertension, heart attack, and stroke, and is also related to sexual function in men. Writing with his colleague C. Leigh Broadhurst in the September/October 1998 Herbs for Health, Duke says that the tremendous hype over the impotence drug Viagra piqued his interest in an herbal alternative, which he found in sunflower seeds because of their high level of arginine. Arginine increases the body’s nitric oxide levels. Sexual excitement signals pelvic nerves to call up nitric oxide, which helps blood vessels expand and the penis to become engorged to create an erection.

Naturopaths who recommend arginine to men with low sperm counts advise 4 g of arginine a day. Our cup of sunflower seeds contains about 2 g; Duke cautions that sunflower seeds must be completely digested and the protein broken down before the body can use the arginine.

Gentlemen, did I get your attention? Ladies, do you know what snack to serve your gentlemen callers?

A power flower through history

Sunflowers have a history as colorful as the faces they turn to the sun. Aztec priestesses in the ­fifteenth century crowned themselves with sunflowers and the sunflower image was emblazoned in gold on their temples. Spanish explorers took sunflower seeds back to the Old World as gifts for their queen in the early sixteenth century.

The first large-scale cultivation of sunflowers happened in Russia in the sixteenth century, after the czar Peter the Great saw them growing in the royal gardens of Holland. It was in Russia that improvements of the wild American variety began, and the roasted seeds became so popular there that they were sold on street corners and in railway stations. In the Netherlands, the plant’s ability to absorb water from the soil was put to use in the reclaiming of swampland. The Chinese grew sunflowers for the fiber in their stalks, which they mixed with silk.

In the Americas, where the sunflower originated, it was used in many ways by Native Americans for 8,000 years, some sources say, and it has been cultivated for at least 3,000 years by many tribes, from the Choctaws of the Southeast to the Senecas of the North and the Pawnee of the Great Plains. Hopi Indians carved wooden sunflowers and kept them sacred, believing they would bring rain and enrich their sunflower harvest.

The Indians used sunflower as a food staple, grinding the roasted seeds into a fine meal, which they used alone or mixed with corn meal and pressed into thin cakes and baked. They used the meal to thicken soups and stews, and they made sunflower butter and shaped it into balls to take with them when they traveled. They steeped the hulls in boiling water to produce a coffee-like beverage. They extracted a purple dye from the hulls of purple-seeded varieties and a yellow dye from the petals. The dried petals and pollen dyed their faces for ceremonial dances. They boiled the seeds to draw out the oil, which they used as hair ointment and in cooking. They even used dried sap from the leaves to relieve thirst.

Pioneers in the New World used the fiber from the stalks to make rope. During World War I, the U.S. government encouraged the growing of sunflowers, whose oil was used in the manufacture of munitions. The leaves were once included in herb tobacco mixtures and, in modern times, parts of the sunflower plant are still used as poultry feed and litter, and the oil has been researched as a potential substitute for diesel fuel.

Ah, this plant! Throughout the centuries, it has also been widely used medicinally by traditional herbalists. According to Maud Grieve, in her 1931 A Modern Herbal, the diuretic and expectorant qualities of the plant were put to use in a syrup for the treatment of coughs, colds, bronchial and pulmonary infections, and whooping cough. Sunflower was used as a substitute for quinine in the treatment of malarial fever. The leaves would be spread out on a cloth covering a bed, moistened with warm milk, then the patient would be wrapped up in it and made to perspire, Grieve tells us. The process would be repeated every day until the fever was gone. Russian folk healers would chop the head of a sunflower and soak it in vodka to rub on rheumatic patients as a liniment. They made decoctions of the seeds for jaundice, malaria, heart conditions, diarrhea, and other ­ailments.

In the marketplace today, many products contain sunflower seed or its oil, including herbal supplements, nutrition bars for energy and endurance, diet milkshakes, soaps, and other body care products.

Kathleen Halloran is a freelance writer on herbs and health and the former editor of The Herb Companion, Herbs for Health’s sister publication. She lives in Laporte, Colorado.

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